Britain’s biggest bank heist was ‘executed flawlessly’ — then it fell apart

Surrounded by some of southeast England’s most desirable real estate, the western Kent town of Tonbridge — 40 miles from central London — wasn’t the kind of place to keep police on the edge of their seats in suspense.

But in the early hours of Feb. 22, 2006, a call came in that rocked local law enforcement — and shortly after, an entire nation.

Kent Police rushed to a nondescript Securitas depository near the Tonbridge rail station, only to find that the largest bank heist in the history of the United Kingdom — 53 million pounds — had just been pulled, the perpetrators gone without a trace.

Moments before, a motley crew of criminals had charged in with assault rifles, submachine guns and pump-action shotguns. Some employees had been tied up inside the money cages, while others were forced to help load the stolen cash onto a truck.

Police were stunned.

“It was executed flawlessly. Nobody was hurt. You just don’t see this stuff happening in real life,” Pat Kondelis, director of “Catching Lightning,” a new Showtime docuseries exploring the incident, told The Post.

“To hold 14-plus people hostage for over an hour and get away with [the equivalent of] $92.2 million in cash, not firing a weapon, is pretty damn remarkable.”

It should have gone perfectly

The execution was indeed remarkable.

There were elaborate and pricey disguises created by a London makeup artist with theater experience; a plan that involved installing one of the criminals as an employee at the depot weeks in advance to film the setting through a belt loop camera; and even the kidnapping of the depot manager.

The heist began hours before the main event. A handful of thugs dressed in Kent Police uniforms pulled depot manager Colin Dixon over on a quiet road between work and home, coercing him into their vehicle and holding him at gunpoint.

Dixon was then taken to a nearby farm, where he was questioned on the layout of the depot, and informed that his wife Lynn and young son Craig had also been kidnapped — lest he was considering making any false moves.

“You don’t have stories like this in real life, this is stuff that you would think is completely made up for a scripted Hollywood film,” Kondelis said. “The fact that they did this, that they use prosthetics [to carry out] the kidnapping, they were doing the surveillance — you just don’t see this stuff happen.”

One of the robbers, Keyinde “Kane” Patterson, had been delegated to walk Dixon into the Securitas facility so he could unlock the series of doors needed to reach the money. Upon doing so, the rest of the heavily armed robbers — seven in total — flooded in along with their truck.

Unlike depositories in the states, employees at Securitas were defenseless and without the protection of armed guards.

“There’s no guns in the entire building,” Kondelis said. “It’s still shocking to me that England, when it comes to a situation like that, they’re so anti-gun that they won’t, essentially, protect their workers … in a situation like this.”

The military-precise operation ended with all the workers and Dixon’s family being put into the cages upon the unopposed departure of Lee and his crew.

“They left half a billion dollars in cash,” Kondelis said. “If they had more trucks, God knows what they would have gotten.”

The great unraveling

Too bad the criminals didn’t plan nearly so meticulously for the aftermath.

Very quickly, the entire thing began to unravel, thanks to a combination of arrogance, pure sloppiness and a police tip that led to the makeup artist, Michelle Hogg.

The young woman had previously worked in cosmetics at upscale department store Harvey Nichols but was recruited to disguise the robbers.

After rummaging through her trash — finding a labeled makeup palette along with more prosthetic scraps and DNA — police saw that the heist had in part been the work of celebrity south London criminal and MMA brawler “Lightning” Lee Murray, well-known and feared in the region as a gang member and drug runner.

Tony Fryklund, one of Murray’s former fighting trainers, recalled a night before the robbery where they were pulled over after Murray — who fought and won the respect of Brazilian MMA champ Anderson Silva — had clipped a car’s mirror while speeding down a London street.

“‘Do you know the f – – k who I am?! Get the f – – k out of here!’” Fryklund recalls in the series of Murray yelling at the officers. “And the two cops get back in the car and piss off,” Fryklund continued. “It f – – king blew me away, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

By 2006, Murray had teamed up with the group — led by local career criminal Lea Rusha —that carried out the heist, by then very likely in the late stages of preparation.

“I think Lea Rusha called Lee Murray after all these things were already in works, [saying] ‘It’s gonna be easy, nobody’s gonna get hurt. It’s gonna be a cakewalk. Get in and get out with a ton of money,’” Kondelis said.

“What I’ve been told about Lee Murray is that he just liked action. I don’t think he needed the money.”

Having a man as feared as Murray on the team might have even deterred a last-second disruption to the plan.

“The Metropolitan Police in London got a tip the night before it happened … And then they just don’t do anything,” Kondelis said. “It was a huge mistake on the part of the police.”

A tough guy like Murray also wasn’t afraid of making hard choices.

“None of us knew [Dixon] had a kid,” Murray says on archived audio phone calls. “That was just sprung on us in the moment, obviously we’d gone too far down the road to turn back.”

All the planning in the world couldn’t have accounted for Hogg’s eventual decision to tell police everything she knew, which she insisted was little to nothing beyond the names of the men she’d been hired by.

Not that the entire case turned on Hogg’s testimony — the criminals had left enough uncovered tracks of their own.

Within hours, police had turned up vehicles used in the heist, some still stuffed with millions in bank notes. Very quickly, police had recovered about half of the money, and were able to arrest Rusha, along with other major players, while Murray fled to Morocco with accomplice and close friend Paul Allen.

Loose ends

In relatively short order, and with Hogg’s assistance, the bulk of the group wound up behind bars, some serving as little as 15 years, while others were sentenced to life.

With a 7-million pound contract reportedly on Hogg’s head, she soon disappeared into witness protection, while authorities continued to hunt down the remaining two criminals known to be involved.

Murray, however, was not one of them. For all his brawler bravado, a life of luxury and flashy cars in Morocco with accomplice pal Allen had authorities on his tail within weeks.

“Our plan was not to get caught,” Murray says. “We probably thought we was just going to walk in, walk out and fade away.”

Instead, they were arrested. The Moroccan-born Murray was never successfully extradited back to England.

After being detained in his homeland until 2010, during which time Moroccan authorities uncovered an escape plan, Murray was given a 10-year sentence, which was later appealed and more than doubled. Unless pardoned by King Mohammed VI, Murray will remain in prison until 2035.

To this day, authorities are still hunting Patterson, and another accomplice, Sean Lupton — the latter evaporated after an initial arrest in 2006. The two men, Kondelis believes, are the key to locating the missing money.

“I think [Lupton is] definitely [in] Cyprus,” he said. “We went there. We talked to people that claim that they’ve seen him very recently. Multiple people. In fact, I think it was, like seven or eight different people around northern Cyprus.”

Kane, on the other hand, has vanished without a trace.

“More than half the money that was stolen has never been found,” Kondelis said. “Somebody got away with it, which is really remarkable.”

“Catching Lightning” premieres on Showtime Apr. 7.